


Without You I'm Nothing

by gingertintedglasses



Series: One Shots [5]
Category: Captain America (Movies), Marvel Cinematic Universe
Genre: M/M, Soulmate-Identifying Marks, Soulmates, Stucky - Freeform
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2016-04-25
Updated: 2016-04-25
Packaged: 2018-06-04 08:37:26
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 1,362
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6650632
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/gingertintedglasses/pseuds/gingertintedglasses
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Here's the thing.  Steve got Bucky's name.  Which was great.  Steve got Bucky's name twice.  Which was not so great.  </p><p>Bucky got Steve's name.  Bucky got Steve's name twice.  </p><p>It didn't make sense to either of them, and it didn't make sense to anyone they knew.  They'd been best friends.  Since third grade.  Marks didn't show until puberty but damn if everyone and their brother didn't think they'd be soul-marked for one another.  </p><p>And everyone and their brother was right. </p><p>Sort of.</p>
            </blockquote>





	Without You I'm Nothing

Here's the thing.  Steve got Bucky's name.  Which was great.  Steve got Bucky's name  _twice_.  Which was not so great.  

 

Bucky got Steve's name.  Bucky got Steve's name  _twice_.  

 

It didn't make sense to either of them, and it didn't make sense to anyone they knew.  They'd been best friends.  Since  _third grade_.  Marks didn't show until puberty but damn if everyone and their brother didn't think they'd be soul-marked for one another.  

 

And everyone and their brother was right. 

 

Sort of.

 

Bucky got his first.   _Steve_  imprinted in the smaller, older boy's familiar handwriting down the side of his forefinger.  On his dominant hand.  That was where your soulmate's name came in.  

 

And then a couple weeks later, on his other hand, the hand meant for your enemies.  The mark not everyone got, but if you did it meant you were probably going to die in a war, or because you got mixed up with "the wrong crowd", or because you were spectacularly unlucky and someone would hate you enough to warrant a warning.  

 

  
_Steve_  showed up again, letters thin and spread out over his knuckles.  In Cyrillic text.  What the fuck did that mean?  " _Aside from 'Don't swear in front of your sister, James?' We'll have to ask a doctor_."   _his Ma had said._  


 

He didn't want to show Steve, but it was a little hard when it was all over both of his hands and they were together from waking to sleeping, practically.

 

Steve's didn't show up for another two years, his size and his constitution delaying him.  

 

  
_Bucky_  formed across the palm of his dominant hand, dark and neat and sharp.  

 

And for a year, that was it.

 

Until  _Bucky_  showed up again, trailing from his wrist towards his elbow in the same script.  

 

No one could make sense of it.  Friends, family,  _doctors_  - no one had heard of such a thing before.  One's soulmate and mortal enemy being the same person.  

 

No one had been able to explain why the name on Bucky's knuckles kept wearing away and reforming again and again over the years, sometimes disappearing completely and other times appearing to have been hastily erased, bits and pieces across his knuckles like healing abrasions.

 

Best of all -worst of all?- was that Steve and Bucky never drifted apart.  Bucky's doctor encouraged putting space between them.  It would make it easier to bear, his doctor reasoned, when the inevitable happened and they were no longer friends.  

 

Bucky got a new doctor because he would be damned if some jackass in a white coat was the reason he and Steve started hating each other.  

 

Steve wouldn't tell Bucky what his doctor said.  He changed the subject often enough that Bucky eventually stopped asking.  

 

*****

 

There were theories.  Because of course there were.  That Steve's name kept wearing off on one hand because he was so sickly he wouldn't live long enough for their relationship to grow antagonistic.  That Steve's name showed up in another language because someone -someone  _Russian-_  would come in between them and start the series of events that ended the part of their relationship that had always been the only sure, happy thing they'd had. 

 

There were theories that it was symbolic.  Most people thought Hate-Marks showed up in symbolic spots.  

 

Towards the end of high school, a rumor kicked up that Bucky would beat Steve to death while Steve tried to shield himself with his arms.  Bucky beat the shit out of the guys who started it, the skin on his knuckles flayed and bleeding by the end of the scuffle. He ignored how dark the lettering on his knuckles came back when his hands healed.

 

So many other people talked about their marks, that they rarely did.  They refused to mention them at all once Bucky got his papers.  

 

Steve refused to mention his acceptance into Project Rebirth in his letters to Bucky not only because it was classified, but because he was terrified the procedure, if he was chosen, would change him so much he'd be worthy of the mark on Bucky's knuckles.  He wondered if  _not_  telling him about Project Rebirth would do the damage for him.  He wondered if it wouldn't be anything more than he deserved, risking the name on his palm for the chance to be better.  To help.

 

It didn't matter.  It would be redacted if it was mentioned and so he didn't bother wasting anyone's time or ink.

 

*****

 

Project Rebirth, as it turned out, changed everything but the marks on his hands and how easily he and Bucky fell back into their same-old-same-old, albeit with more gunfire and higher stakes than before.  

 

Steve's name kept wearing off of Bucky's knuckles, same as always, and Bucky's name remained bold and stark on Steve's palm, even though it was his shield-hand.

 

The only thing that did matter, in the end, was Steve watching as Bucky fell down, down, down; Steve's outstretched arm, the one with  _Bucky_  printed down the length of it, not reaching far enough in time. Bucky's hand, the one with  _Steve_  across the knuckles, grasping at air.

 

*****

 

Peggy was usually right, and Steve loved her for it, among all of his other reasons.

 

She was not right about this.  She wasn't there and he hadn't specified things like who reached for who with what hand.  Steve had killed Bucky and it'd been imprinted in his skin since he was fifteen and he'd been foolish enough to think he could escape it.  

 

*****

 

A lot of people would speculate that he'd killed himself.  Steve knew better than most how willing people were to make other people's business their own.  They wouldn't be wrong.

 

But they wouldn't be  _right_  either.  

 

It wasn't wrong to say that Steve found it hard to sit up in the morning with the weight of what he'd done - _what he hadn't done_ \- on his conscience and sometimes he thought it would be nice to not  _have_  to sit up.  

 

It wasn't wrong to say that Steve had seen what the Cube could do in the wrong hands.  That even in the  _right_  hands (was there such a thing?) it had too much potential to do more harm than good and if it kept the Cube from being found, then he'd keep his coordinates to himself lest someone stumble upon the Cube, tracing his departure point to his crash site.  

 

He wondered if it was this cold for Bucky, in the end.  He hoped Peggy found herself a dancing partner.

 

*****

 

Waking up in a new century had been difficult enough but it was worse having to face it all with Bucky's name on both his hands and have it be such a rarity  _still_.  

 

He'd have thought with how frequently people swore at one another on the Internet anonymously, that there would have been an abundance of people with the same name written on both hands.  

 

S.H.I.E.L.D. employed his talents and only the newest recruits ever eyed his marks.  

 

The seasoned ones, and the ones with the right clearance and directives, studied them extensively.  

 

He was used to being poked and prodded and studied like a lab rat by medics in white coats.  He preferred the stares.  

 

*****

 

It wasn't until he ripped the mask off of the assassin that he understood.  

 

Bucky.   _Bucky_.  

 

To quote Bucky from when their marks had first appeared: what the fuck?

 

Sam said he didn't realize Captain America was allowed to swear, but that the American people would probably forgive him for it, given the circumstances.

 

It wasn't until Bucky was kneeling over him, beating him to death while the helicarrier they were on plummeted towards the Potomac that Steve  _truly_  understood.

 

No matter how hard Bucky had beaten those boys in 1936, Steve's name ripping off his knuckles from the force of the hits he was landing, they had still been right.

 

*****

 

It wasn't until he found Bucky two years later, regaining his memory and both of their Hate-Marks fading -in Bucky's case without returning- that Steve understood.

 

"You said 'til the end of the line.'"

 

Bucky smirked.  "Looks like we made it."

 

 


End file.
